Tories fight to protect Wandsworth borough amid doorstep anger over Brexit

Mike Loftus is angry. “This area voted 75 per cent Remain and the Conservatives have ignored it,” he said. “That really pissed me off.”

On May 3, the 46-year-old, who works in operations at a hedge fund, plans to punish the party he would otherwise have been voting for.

“I usually vote Conservative but I’m going to vote Liberal Democrat because they are the only anti-Brexit party,” he said, jaw fixed.

It takes a lot to make Conservatives around here vote against their council. For we are in Wandsworth: Not just a borough, but a political phenomenon. A council that set a zero poll tax for two years running while collecting bins on time and brushing streets spotless. This year it set the second cheapest council tax in London at just £716.51 per year for a Band D property.

For many of Mr Loftus’s neighbours in Buckhold Road, a street of modest semis and terraces where hatchbacks and builders’ skips squeeze into paved-over front gardens, Wandsworth means value for money that is too good to lose.

Sandy Middleton, a 50-year-old HR manager, backed Labour at the 2017 general election but does not want to change the colour of the town hall door. “I don’t normally vote Conservative but you just cannot complain about Wandsworth,” she said. “It’s still the cheapest borough in London and we don’t have any complaints about the services.”

And yet the word on the streets is that the Conservatives could lose control of this citadel for the first time in 40 years. The bookies have Labour and the Tories level pegging at 11-10.

A short ride on a Clapham omnibus to Lavender Hill brings me face to face with what might become the next major political phenomenon to be born in “The Brighter Borough”, as it likes to be known. It is the Renew Party.

“We’re saying, ‘Vote for your usual party on the local issues,’ but if you want to make a statement about Brexit, then vote for us with your third vote,” said Renew founder Chris Coghlan, who was canvassing a side street overlooking the lattice of lines curving into Clapham Junction.

Of six activists in his flashmob, half were former Conservatives: ex-Tory councillor James Cousins — a 44-year-old NHS manager fighting to win back his Shaftesbury seat under new colours — and lawyers June Hilton and George Hilton.

Renew stands for pro-EU and centre-ground politics — ideals they feel were abandoned after the 2016 referendum. If it sounds like Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! movement, it is no coincidence. “I wouldn’t have had the confidence to walk out of my job at the Foreign Office if I hadn’t seen En Marche! do it,” said Mr Coghlan, who was a counter-terrorism officer working against Islamic State.

Extraordinarily, his movement claims 20 staff, 5,000 supporters, three wealthy donors and 1,200 would-be parliamentary candidates. It is running in every Wandsworth ward now and aims to contest every parliamentary constituency at the next election.

In Lavender Hill most householders knew nothing about them — but none was hostile. Lecturer Stuart Oliver told Mr Cousins he will make a Brexit protest by voting Green, as usual. “There are too many third parties at the moment,” he said. Marketing consultant Richard Edwards was sticking with Labour but could “consider” Renew another time. Johnny Woodman, 28, a salesman, said: “In theory I would vote for them, but I am not certain how local elections fit into their wider picture.”

A passer-by clasped Mr Coghlan’s hand and pledged his vote. “I thought the whole country had gone insane in 2016,” he said, asking not to be named. “They voted for a pack of lies.”

A new Macron? Or a pipe dream? Wandsworth’s Labour group leader Simon Hogg thinks the real significance of Brexit in local elections will be a depressing effect on the Tory turnout. “Conservatives have a huge problem because Brexit severed that tribal connection for a very large proportion of their voters,” he claimed.

He invited me to join him knocking on doors in Eliot Court, a council block off Garratt Lane in Southfields ward. The corridors are brightly painted and well lit, but residents complain of rodents and cockroaches.

“Mice are everywhere,” said Shakira Ulysses-Bryden, a performing arts student. “They’ve even been said to jump into people’s letterboxes.” Mr Hogg’s team of canvassers had concocted a petition on the issue in a bid to motivate voters and improve turnout.

Clifton Edmondson, 59, pointed at bags of rubbish dropped from an upstairs flat outside his bedroom window. “This has been going on since I came five years ago,” he said.

“I can’t open a window at night because of it.”

When asked what made her vote Labour, Nina Ansah, a 27-year-old nursery nurse, replied: “The way we live.”

What did she think of Jeremy Corbyn? She sighed. “He is trying his best.”

Eliot Court was an unambitious showground for Mr Hogg’s troops. But it lies in a challenging ward, Southfields, where Labour has not come close in 40 years. To control the borough, Labour must take at least two of its three seats. A year ago that seemed unlikely. But now a third political bandwagon is rolling through Wandsworth: Corbyn.

“Jeremy Corbyn has a brand of politics that young people in London really respond to,” said Mr Hogg.

The pragmatic Hogg is no Corbynite. His keynote pledges include a council tax freeze for two years. But a Corbynite turnout surge, which helped flip the Battersea constituency in 2017, might carry him over the line, especially if combined with a post-Brexit Tory dip.

However, Wandsworth’s council leader since 2011, Ravi Govindia, has the relaxed confidence of a businessman who knows his customers inside out and reckons he has the best wares in town.

Housing, he said, is what people want and what he is delivering: more social housing, more homes to buy and rent with a £150 million investment, and — unlike strife-torn Labour Haringey — a promise to let locals return after estates are revamped. “We never take the electorate for granted,” said the Conservative leader. “The reason we have been trusted for 40 years is that we always deliver on our promises.”

He sought to reassure the large diaspora of European Union citizens by pointing to his own back story as an immigrant, aged 17.

“In 1972 a previous Conservative prime minister [Edward Heath] said to my family, just as it was about to be thrown out of Uganda, ‘Don’t worry — we will look after you.’ And he did.

We value our EU nationals, and we welcome them.”

Mr Govindia said he does not need to “bang the drum” for his rock-bottom council tax. “Residents know we do that. Our core position is that you have to be careful with money to be able to do good. That’s why we can promise to put in sprinklers [in tower blocks].”

Nobody is daring to predict what will happen on May 3. But there are signs that the political pendulum, which stopped here in 1978, is finally moving again.

In 2014, the Conservatives won by 41 seats to 19. The vote share was Tory 39.8 per cent, Labour 32.2 per cent.

But in the 2016 mayoral contest, local lad Sadiq Khan came top in Wandsworth borough with 43 per cent to Zac Goldsmith’s 41. Then in the 2017 general election Labour captured Battersea and slashed Justine Greening’s majority in Putney from 10,000 to just 1,554. Nationally, Mr Corbyn’s party is polling 12 points higher than four years ago.

The result will have major implications for national politics that go far beyond the fate of a symbolic Tory citadel.

One senior minister said the Conservatives must make a historic choice: “The question for the next election is whether we should appeal to Mansfield Man or Wandsworth Man,” said the figure, referring to the tolerant metropolitan values of a London borough, versus the anti-immigrant Brexiteer values that Theresa May paraded in last year’s general election.

But Estrella Gal, a 25-year-old nurse from Spain, has already switched off. One of thousands of EU nationals who work for the NHS, she is entitled to vote in Wandsworth where she lives with her landlady but will not bother. “I’m not going to vote,” she said. “They don’t want to listen to Europeans.”

Additional reporting: Sophia Sleigh